Lovers Also Need Thesauruses

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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Z, a young woman from a small village in China, is offered a trip to England by her parents so she can learn English and improve her prospects in life. She arrives in London during a typical grim winter in the mid-noughties, oblivious as to how to behave and comprehend this Western capital. Her hostel is dire and the students in her English course label her a pariah because of her inability to behave in a "Western" way.

Z spends most of her time trying to decode this new world with a Chinese-English dictionary - and the novel itself is also divided this way, with each chapter starting with a word and its dictionary definition (relevant to the chapter in question) that sheds light onto Z's uncovering of this world. Often, Z's misunderstandings are meant to be humorous, but because Z is such a nutter - and a slightly unsympathetic one - the humour is a misfire.

One evening, she strikes conversation with a much older man in a cinema and very soon she's his lover. He's a van driver and part-time artist based in Hackney. They fall madly in love, things get kinky, summer arrives, she travels across Europe under his suggestion (to improve her understanding of the West)... then things get complicated.

The novel is based on Xiaolu Guo's own experience of moving to London in 2002 and keeping a journal. There are some pleasures to be found in its description of Hackney, and an interesting twist relating to the older lover. The cover is deceptively chick lit - this novel is anything but.

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